Ancient Greek GCSE - experiences?

[dylexicdementor11]

Does anyone have an LO that is taking or has done a GCSE in Ancient Greek? Did they enjoy it? How stressful was it compared to their other courses?

Thank you for all the lovely responses. It is heartening to hear how many people have fond memories from a Latin and Greek GCSEs.
We have been incredibly lucky with DD’s brilliant Latin teacher and DD has been obsessed with Greek myths (including Percy Jackson) for a long time.
Thanks everyone for sharing your experiences - we will do our best to support DD in her interest.

I did Greek GCSE back in the 90s, too - started from scratch in the roughest sixth form college in our local area alongside Class Civ A-level, without any experience of Latin or anything similar. Again, just another example of an eccentric and inspiring teacher. She told us that she’d been told she would have to supervise the multigym for the ‘complementary studies’ slot on her timetable and she offer Greek instead. She was a phenomenon. There were six of us, we did half an hour a week for four terms and all of us got A* grades out of nowhere. Four of us went on to get degrees in some version of classics. She changed our lives.

Sorry, that’s a very nostalgic and self-centred post. Good luck to your DD! It’s such a joy.

My Latin / Greek teacher was also the school librarian, & gave me a holiday job while I was at university cataloguing the library. I loved it.

That's really impressive! Well done to all concerned.

That is wonderful. Do you know where the teacher is now, and if she knows the effect she had?

The Greek education system keeps the language "alive" as a high number of their school students will be studying ancient language/stories and philosophy as part of their general education.
Tis a shame it tends to be restricted here to a few independent schools or a few enthusiastic teachers doing lunchtime clubs

Its harder to get the very top grade as students that take classics tend to be more able so the curve of marks works against them. It was the same for class civ gcse in my childs independent school. Obviously lots of
students still get the very top grades though.

@ForLimeBiscuitThat certainly hasn’t been my experience, although admittedly I’ve only taught in selective independent schools. Classical civilisation tends to be taken by a much broader range of abilities (often skewing towards lower ability pupils), so it definitely isn’t the case for this subject!

My childrens school is selective high achieving. The straight grade 9 kids are fine but looking at the cohort as a whole there were more grade 6’s (which is considered a low grade in their school abd you would not be permitted to take an alevel) than you would normally expect given performance in other subjects. Might be poor teaching of course.

I would dispute this tbh tho I know about the bell curve. If you score well, you’ll get high mark.

Just checked OCR classical Greek for2024; 50% got you a 5, 63% got you a 7. That’s very much on par with OCR English lang GBs (just as an example) which were 53% for grade 5 and 68% for grade 7.

For grade 9 it was 82 % eng lang and 85% for Greek.

DS took Ancient Greek for GCSE in 2024. He loved it both as an intellectual challenge and because he loves languages, literature and history and studying Classics combines all these. He had done Latin for several years and his school offered both as a single GCSE option.
Tangentially, I was happy to see him learning to write AG by hand rather than via a keyboard.
Good luck to your DD!

I think that the bell curve applies less in smaller subjects like Greek as it isn't a very large candidate field. I do recall that when I took O level Greek in the dark ages about 70% of entrants got an A and pretty well everyone else a B. I think it was a subject people only took if they had an aptitude for it.

At the independent senior school DD will join, all students take classical civ and Latin and the top set take Greek and Latin.

Yes - this rings a bell as well. I got a B and only effectively sat 75% of the paper as I hadn't bothered studying one of the set texts which was worth 25% of the total marks.

UCL run a summer course in July for ages 14 and up from beginners to more experienced students. It could be a good way to try it.

Oh, thanks! I had no idea. I’ll check it would but London is a bit far for us. Maybe next year.

I’ve read your post properly now and shown DD the UCL summer course website. She’s a little too young and we’ve missed the deadline - but she is very keen to attend in a few years. Thanks so much for telling me about their courses.

Lovely - my y8 is desperate to do it when she's old enough. Also obsessed with ancient Greek via Percy Jackson & The Song of Achilles!

It may have changed, but UCL and KCL used to run the London Summer School in Classics jointly and the venue alternated between the two sites (Bloomsbury and the Strand). My daughter did it two or three times and found it extremely useful. I believe there are other summer schools dotted around the country, possibly including residential courses.

The JACT residential course at Bryanston is the most well known, and I'd say that most of my fellow classicists at university had done it. I went twice (end of L6 and end of U6). It's only for 16+, but it's a great experience, particularly if you're planning to do classics beyond school.

I went to it 3 years in a row when it was based in Cheltenham. Meant that I had loads of friends when I went to university. It was a great course.

City Lit offer a number of online courses for both the language and the culture. Not sure if they allow DC - maybe if safeguarding can be satisfied.

Bryanston! The nerdiest experience of my whole life 😊
Happy days.

I did it in the 90s and it was an absolutely brilliant experience for me for two main reasons:

1. I was very clever and everything at school was easy until I started Greek in year 10. I found it hard. There was so much vocabulary to learn and the grammar was difficult too, especially the different cases. It meant for the first time I was getting Bs instead of As and I got 60% in the end of year 10 exam. It was a shock to the system but it did me no end of good because I found I couldn't just do everything without work and I learned how to work and how to perservere with difficult things.
2. The grammar was fantastic because I got a real understanding which I could later apply to other languages and it has meant I've been able to pick up a few languages over the years.

I would definitely recommend doing it. Once I got over the shock of finding it hard I really enjoyed the challenge of it.

In my class we all got As apart from one person who was still high from something she had taken the night before one of the papers. That was apparent when we discussed the unseen translation text afterwards and she told us what she had written (it was a completely different story) and she said "Oh, I might be still tripping".